Oracle technology chief Larry Ellison is embarking on a journey Microsoft couldn’t complete: beating Amazon’s cloud services on price.
Oracle’s former CEO is reported to have kicked off a price war by committing his database firm to undercutting AWS on storage.
“We are prepared to compete with Amazon.com on price,” Ellison said …

Oracle has, in the past few minutes, announced that company founder Larry Ellison has stepped down as chief executive, effective immediately.
Outspoken Ellison will remain with the company in the capacity of chief technology officer, and he will continue to oversee all software and hardware engineering functions, Oracle said in …

When you kick a giant in the shins and threaten to cut it off at the knees, do it in a jurisdiction you believe will provide you with a sympathetic jury.
That's the strategy advised by Seth Ravin, founder and CEO of third-party application support outfit Rimini Street.
The ten year-old company is an irritant to Oracle and SAP …

OpenWorld
Larry Ellison is so confident that Oracle's new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering lets customers move their databases and applications to the cloud "with the push of a button" that he was even willing to try it himself in front of an audience of thousands.
Ellison used his Tuesday afternoon keynote at this year's OpenWorld …

Oracle's Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men and best-paid CEOs in the US, is getting his pay cut by more than half.
The database giant's chief executive has been awarded just 3 million stock options by its compensation committee in its annual review process.
That’s down from 7 million the year before and every year …

Oracle’s soon-to-be-ex-CEO Larry Ellison took home slightly less money in fiscal 2014 than the previous year, after some rumblings of criticism at the sizeable nature of his big package.
The poor billionaire bagged just $67.3m in compensation, instead of the $78.4m he managed to make off with in fiscal 2013, a markdown of 15.5 …

Oracle founder and chief exec Larry Ellison has managed to stay one of the highest-paid CEOs of the hundred largest publicly traded US firms for another year, despite his shrinking package.
Ellison topped the lot with a take-home of $78.4m in 2013. That's a hefty hunk of dosh, but it was down $18m from his 2012 compensation. The …

Despite once declaring that the cloud was “complete gibberish”, “insane” and “idiocy”, former Oracle head honcho Larry Ellison has announced that the firm is now ready to be the foundation of the cloud for its customers.
Larry Ellison speaking at Oracle Openworld yesterday (28th September)
Speaking at the company’s Openworld …

When it comes to soundbites, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison is a pro. Reporters show up not just to hear what he says, but how he says it.
Bill Gates, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, cloud, yachting, his own phenomenal success – all have been subject to Ellison's barbs and meditations.
Scheduled or off-the-cuff, his words turned a …

Oracle chief exec Larry Ellison has agreed to waive a potential payout of $575m to clear up accusations of a conflict of interest over Oracle's acquisition of Pillar Data Systems, a company Ellison owned.
Ellison agreed to hand back over 95 per cent of an "earn-out" payday he got when Oracle slurped Pillar in 2011, after two …

Oracle supremo Larry Ellison and TV's Oprah Winfrey are ready to buy basketball team the Los Angeles Clippers after its owner Donald Sterling was booted out of the sport, it's claimed.
The database head honcho, worth $50bn, and the telly talk-show titan, plus record producer David Geffen, are said to be keen to snap up the team …

Tech magnate and extremely rich chap Larry Ellison bemoans the effect technology has on children.
Billionaire Larry Ellison was asked at the Oracle Human Capital Management summit on Thursday about what changes he thought technology might have on the world.
After plugging a movie his daughter produced – "Her" – as a good …

Larry Ellison appears unbothered by Oracle's third-quarter revenues remaining flat at US$9.3bn, despite that sum disappointing financial analysts.
Big Red revealed its recent results today, and GAAP net income for the three-month period ended February 28 was $2.5bn, down three per cent year on year, or 56 cents per share. …

Oracle and its founder Larry Ellison are facing fresh calls from shareholders to change the company's high compensation structure for executives, and stop ignoring requests to communicate with directors.
Dutch and UK shareholder groups PGGM and Railways Pension Trustee Company Limited have more than 2.8 million members and $ …

There’s more to cloud than putting an ad on the back of The Economist, as a relatively contrite Larry Ellison and Oracle tried to demonstrate this week.
His PR people rattled out the product news at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, California, like he, or they, were trying to prove something.
What could it be?
“ …

Investors had their knives out for Oracle once again on Wednesday after the database giant's fourth-quarter results missed analysts' estimates on both earnings and revenue.
The report capped off a disappointing year for Oracle, one in which its total revenue for the twelve months was flat from the previous year, at $38.23bn. It …

Oracle has pledged to be the planet's lowest-cost provider of core data centre equipment.
Executive Chair Larry Ellison today announced a refresh of the company's Engineered Systems range – they're now called X5 – and a new strategy to offer the industry's lowest purchase prices.
Ellison's rationale for the low-price play is …

Analysis
What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison? God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.
So goes the title of Mark Wilson's 2003 biography on Ellison, Oracle's now former chief executive – a man who by force of will forged a multi-billion dollar software empire.
In the process, Ellison became not just the best-rewarded CEO on …

Oracle supremo Larry Ellison has told Apple that it doesn't stand a chance of success without Steve Jobs at the helm.
In an interview with CBS, the multibillionaire performed a bizarre dance routine meant to illustrate what chance Apple has in the post-Jobs era. Just like the oracles of old, Ellison's predictions take a bit of …

OpenWorld
During his OpenWorld keynote on Sunday, Oracle CEO CTO Larry Ellison took time out from talking up his company's cloud strategy to remind the audience that the database giant is in the hardware business, too – all the way down to the silicon.
Many of Oracle's "engineered systems" are powered by Intel processors – and Intel …

Billionaire Oracle chief Larry Ellison has added to his impressively opulent property portfolio with an entire strip of houses on the so-called "Billionaire's Beach" in Malibu.
Ellison has made sure that he won't have any problems with noisy - or nosy - neighbours by buying a string of properties on Carbon Beach, along with: a …

Analysis
Oracle's executive team spent most of its second-quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday talking about its cloud business – which made sense, since that was the only part of the business that showed significant growth.
As in last quarter's call, the trio of Safra Catz, Larry Ellison, and Mark Hurd chirped away about the …

Oracle boss Larry Ellison's passion for investing in Hawaii has seen him acquire local airline Island Air.
Ellison last year acquired most of Hawaii's sixth-largest island, Lanai. Today he owns 98 per cent of the 141 square mile (365km2) lump of land.
Should the billionaire database guru desire to visit Lanai by air, he can now …

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has nothing but praise for the US National Security Agency's domestic surveillance programs, but he's far less kind when it comes to Google – and in particular its CEO, Larry Page, whose behavior he describes as "evil."
"I know his slogan is 'don't be evil,'" Ellison told correspondent Charlie Rose in an …

Oracle has hit back at shareholder claims that founder and chief Larry Ellison’s pay package is too generous, saying his compensation is “appropriate under the circumstances”.
Like many tech titans, Ellison receives a nominal $1 pay cheque and has been known to refuse bonuses, but is nonetheless compensated by stock options. In …

Larry Ellison has promised to bring holy price down upon the heads of cloud computing infidels.
Microsoft, Amazon, Rackspace and Salesforce are all on notice: Ellison’s database giant will take them on, in infrastructure, platform and on apps.
Ellison told Wall St on Wednesday he will be “price competitive” with Amazon’s AWS, …

OpenWorld
Oracle OpenWorld turned into Oracle SnubWorld on Tuesday, when Larry Ellison ditched his hotly anticipated speech on Oracle's cloud strategy so that he could watch his boat race in the hugely expensive America's Cup.
The swap-out of Larry Ellison for senior product management veep Thomas Kurian was met first with muffled …

Billionaire CEO Larry Ellison has fulfilled the dream of mega-rich folks everywhere: he has just bought his very own island.
Lanai island in Hawaii If you like piña colada... Credit: Hawaii Tourism Authority/Pierce M Myers Photography
The Oracle chief has snapped up the sixth-largest island in Hawaii, Lanai, in a deal with …

Oracle-Sun anniversary
Feeling calm and relaxed? Join the Reg on a journey to an alternate reality where Oracle’s cloud business is the envy of all of its competitors. It holds two trillion objects and is growing faster now than at any time in its history.
What began as something for developers is becoming an enterprise IT staple – a platform for …

There has been plenty of talk about open-source databases growing faster than those belonging to tech dinosaurs like Oracle, but nothing tells a story quite like cash.
MongoDB and Basho, pioneers in NoSQL, yesterday separately announced that they are each receiving further wads of cash from the venture capital sources.
Open- …

When legendary Texan alt.rock ensemble Butthole Surfers recorded their (NSFW) 1996 opus Electriclarryland they almost certainly did not imagine a billionaire named Larry would one day buy a Hawaiian island and decide to revive its economy with solar-powered desalination plants and battery-powered cars.
That billionaire is, of …

Billionaire Oracle chief Larry Ellison has announced his company's public and private cloud services and a multi-tenant version of his core database product, completing his Saul-like conversion from befuddled skeptic.
The database company's chief executive opened his annual Oracle Open World (OOW) conference announcing a public …

The disruptor of disruptors, Oracle boss Larry Ellison, will be 67 on August 17 this year. So when will he retire?
He will be 70 on August 17, 2014. We hear that the R-word is being mentioned by him to close friends, but we hear this from someone, who knows someone, who knows …. so it's veracity is as certain as Sarah Palin …

The ceaseless hoovering up of small companies and startups by business behemoths has seen Oracle buy Front Porch Digital. Why did Larry Ellison latch on to this outfit?
Front Porch Digital (FPD) is a content storage management (CSM) business. Its software products sit in a server between a media network on the one hand and a …

Oracle-Sun anniversary
One Sun swallow doesn’t make a hardware summer, and while it certainly hasn’t for Oracle, it is far from being in a hardware winter for the firm.
Oracle's gulp of Sun Microsystems on 27 January 2010 – five years ago today – has resulted in a generally flagging Sun hardware product business and the growing Engineered System …

Oracle boss Larry Ellison is set to lose $4m on a Bay Area property in Woodside, south of San Francisco.
The Real Estalker reports that Ellison spent $23m in November 2005 to buy two properties a mile away from his main Japanese-style country estate and quite near to Redwood Shores and the Oracle HQ.
1 Turkey Farm Lane 1 Turkey …

SAP and IBM? Pah! Says Larry Ellison. Amazon and Salesforce – them’s my competition these days.
Only the truth is a little more nuanced.
Yes, there is competitive pressure from the cloud entrants but the more Ellison tries to re-invent Oracle, the more he’s going to have to scrap with his rivals IBM and SAP to haul past the new …

The confusion over whether John Fowler will remain at Oracle, now that incomer David Donatelli has an executive vice-president role that includes Fowler's responsibilities, is over. Fowler is staying.
Oracle spokesperson Deborah Hellinger has told The Reg "with John's continued focus on engineering and with the addition of Dave …

Salesforce.com is being eyed up for an acquisition – and has hired financial experts to guide it through the biz gobble, it's claimed.
"Salesforce does not comment on rumors or speculation," the San Francisco-headquartered cloud giant told The Register this afternoon in response to whispers.
There has been no formal offer for …

Oracle boss Larry Ellison was uncharacteristically lost for words, after Hewlett-Packard hired ex SAP CEO Leo Apotheker as its new chief late last week. But the silence didn't last long.
“I’m speechless,” he told the Wall Street Journal, before quickly sharpening his tongue and adding that HP had selected a man “who was recently …

OpenWorld
Oracle headman Larry Ellison kicked off this year's OpenWorld conference on Sunday by touting the lightning-fast performance of the Oracle 12c database's new in-memory database caching option, and he brought along some brand-new hardware to prove his point.
In-memory databases are nothing new, of course. SAP has long flaunted …

One of the big patent cases in tech will finally come to trial this week, as Oracle takes on Google in court over its use of Java software in its Android operating system.
Oracle laid hands on the Java platform when it bought Sun Microsystems in January 2010 and it had filed suit against Google under the new Sun moniker of " …

Larry Ellison has launched the first mainframe-class machine that he can correctly say he made sure came to market, and now he is going to take a run at IBM's mainframe and Unix server businesses.
What's more, it looks like he will to be able to make some credible arguments as to why customers running Oracle software – and …

Oracle is planning to launch a new suite of cloud software products and services in the first week of June, billionaire chief exec Larry Ellison said.
"We’re announcing the general availability of the Oracle Cloud: Platform as a Service, Database Service, Java Service and a bunch of applications," Ellison said during an onstage …

OpenWorld 2012
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison says one of the top advantages of his company's newly announced cloudy application suite is that Oracle uses all of its own technology to build and deploy its cloud apps, and it allows its customers to do the same.
"Oracle owns Java, the most popular programming language in the world," Ellison told the …

The two Larrys will be back in mediation tomorrow, after a day of talks failed to come to any resolution in the Oracle versus Google case over Java patents.
Ellison and Page, Oracle and Google CEOs respectively, were ordered to resolve their differences in front of a federal judge in California on 19 September, and will be back …

Oracle is about to gain millions of fans – by buying software that powers Facebook fan pages. On Tuesday the database giant announced it would acquire Involver, a social-media software company, for an undisclosed sum.
Involver offers a suite of tools that allow companies to develop marketing campaigns enriched social experiences …

Oracle’s co-CEO Mark Hurd is banging the drum for the database giant’s success in cloud computing.
In a TV interview Hurd is reported to have come out fighting.
“Make no mistake about it, we are laser-focused on taking share, we are focused on growing,” Hurd is reported to have said. “We are focused on driving the company …

Oracle has bagged itself a global head to manage the cloudy portfolio just a week after chief techie and erstwhile CEO Larry Ellison talked up the bets the company is placing behind the as-a-service model.
The database titan has hired SAP’s former president of global cloud and line of business Shawn Price, after the German …